Zombie Apocalypse - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Zompocalypse

Don't bother running. You'll just be dead tired.

Zombies are people, too... Okay, dead people, with poor verbal skills. And the only communication they understand is blowing off their heads.

—USA Network commercial for Night Of The Living Dead

Within the past couple days or hours, something very strange has happened. Maybe The Virus the government was working on got unleashed. Maybe a voodoo priest's spell went awry. Maybe an alien space probe broadcast a weird signal at the Earth, or fell to Earth and brought radiation with it. Maybe there's just no more room in Hell.

Whatever the cause, the result is the same; the recently dead have risen, en masse, to feed on the living. With each victim they claim, their numbers swell, and no force on Earth can contain them. As society collapses, it's up to the Big Damn Heroes to fight their way to safety or keep shooting until things blow over.

The Zombie Apocalypse has arrived.

Common to virtually all Zombie Apocalypse tales is that, regardless of the reason zombies attack living/non-infected people, they never attack other zombies. This makes some sense in stories where the zombies are manipulated by some force intent on attacking humanity, or where they need fresh human meat to survive, but it occurs even in films like 28 Days Later where The Virus is just supposed to make the infected vastly more angry and homicidal than before. Why they never turn on their own is rarely, if ever, addressed, although sometimes they can be seen fighting for food, but this never goes beyond pushing each other out of the way. This can be subverted if ordinary humans can avoid being attacked by pretending to be zombies.

The word "zombie" originated in the Voudun beliefs of the Caribbean, referring to a body "revived" and enslaved by a sorcerer known as a bokor. They were a monster of a culture born in forced labor, and the horror to these people was not getting eaten by a zombie, but becoming a zombie — a mindless, senseless, unfeeling slave for eternity. Some of the oldest aspects of zombie appearance are actually symptoms of tetrodotoxin poisoning, a neurotoxin used in certain voudun rituals. In this form, it has been known in America since the late 19th century.

However, it wasn't until the 1960s that George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead attached the word to the modern imagery described above. As Night was accidentally entered into the public domain due to an error in the end credits, it quickly became the object of imitation and emulation by many other directors. Most zombie invasion stories, even those not explicitly based on Romero's films, follow the same conventions, though there are major points of contention. While Romero is responsible for most of the "general" zombie conventions, the more specific and visible zombie tropes are more often inspired by the later works of John Russo, Night's co-writer. Most zombie movies mix-and-match conventions from the Romero and Russo canons. And the Infant Immortality trope gets smacked around a good bit because child zombies show up for additional creeping out factor in movies starting in the 21st Century.

The classic "Romero Rules" for zombies include:

Whatever the cause of zombiism, the effect is pandemic; anyone who dies arises moments later as a zombie, whatever the cause of death, unless they suffer damage to the brain. And we do mean anyone, even children.
The bite of a zombie is infectious, and is always a fatal injury, even if it seems a trivial scratch. This results in the victim returning as a zombie, much to the horror of the Zombie Infectee, though this is essentially coincidental, as zombification would equally result had the infectee died of, say, rabies. This rule is probably the source of the confusion between the first rules of the Romero and Russo rule sets.
Zombies are slow-moving, lumbering, and stupid. Subversions of this have only recently appeared, but are increasingly common. In the Romero canon, it is a recurring theme that zombies become cleverer as time passes.
Zombies are not significantly stronger than humans, though they are not disadvantaged by injury as humans are.
It is generally the case that a single zombie is not a tremendous threat, owing largely to the previous two rules. The threat of zombies generally stems from the fact that they tend to turn up in mobs.
Zombies can be killed only by destroying their brains (or destroying their entire body, as by immolation, which results in the same thing), though rendering them immobile is usually taken to be just as good.
- In the Zombie Survival Guide Max Brooks points out that since zombies can't feel pain a burning zombie will simply keep moving around (and setting other stuff on fire) until they become immobile.
- In Romero movies (most significantly in the Romero produced remake of Night of The Living Dead) the zombies still retain some instinct, so they are scared of fire.
Zombies are compelled to eat the flesh of the living.

The "Russo Rules" are similar, but include several specific differences:

Zombiism is The Virus. Zombiism results only from being bitten by another zombie, though event zero created the first zombie that starts off the chain reaction. Most non-Romero zombie films prefer this convention to Romero's, including the recent remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
A zombie bite results in zombification, though the transition is slow, with the victim becoming progressively more zombie-like. Zombies generally become stupider and less human over time, presumably as their brains decompose. A "recent" zombie may be able to suppress his monstrous tendencies for a time, and continue helping his former friends against the other zombies before being completely overwhelmed by the pain and hunger.
Zombies are stronger than humans. Zombies are nigh-impossible to destroy, as even dismemberment simply creates roving, zombie body parts. They are vulnerable to damage to the brain as above, and to complete immolation — though the airborne smoke can also release The Virus.
Zombies are specifically compelled to eat the brains of living humans. Zombies still possessing the power of speech may begin talking rather obsessively about smelling brains, before their minds deteriorate and leave them saying only, "Brains..." They say "brains" because Russo zombies find being dead very painful, and eating brains is the only thing that eases that perpetual agony. Once they've sated themselves, they can apparently talk and think normally in the interval before the hunger returns.

Neither set of rules explicitly states whether zombies can starve to death. Sometimes zombies can go forever without food, and sometimes they drop when they run out of energy. Whether they can actually digest what they eat also changes from source to source. Usually the issue never comes up because the human protagonists don't last long enough to find out. The Romero films, particularly Land of the Dead, at least strongly imply that zombies can go without food for a very long time. Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z assume that energy isn't an issue and zombies can keep moving indefinitely.

A factor that doesn't really belong to either set of rules is whether a zombie can continue to function underwater. In some examples humans are safe if they are living on remote islands, while in others zombies are able to either walk along the bottom, or at least float with the current and reach any point on the globe. (This is specifically discussed in World War Z, where zombies are able to do both, and the humans are baffled at how they are able to withstand the crushing pressure at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.)

A variant cosmology has popped up recently, in places like Resident Evil or the 28 ... Later films. These zombies are not reanimated dead at all, but living people infected with the series' respective pathogens. This version of The Virus can't actually reanimate, only infect. Therefore, they are vulnerable to the same injuries that can kill a human being.

Another zombie variant that seems to be catching on, and also popularized by the 28 ... Later films, is the idea of the "fast" zombie. Rather than the slow, lumbering, stupid creatures seen in earlier works, these zombies are able to sprint as fast or faster than normal humans and are much more aggressive. This makes them a much more immediate threat, since a single zombie has the potential to wreak major havoc. "Fast" zombies have appeared in many recent zombie media, including the aforementioned 28 ... Later films, the Dawn of the Dead remake, Resident Evil 4 and 5, Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, Dead Set and Zombieland.

In most gaming media (video games, tabletop RP Gs, et.), zombies, and by extension most other undead, exist through the use of dark and unholy magic. Hence, Revive Kills Zombie. In this cosmology, undead are unintelligent and slow, usually on the bottom tier of undead power (but a cut above the typically weakest foe, the skeleton). However, they are typically very resilient and physically powerful. They do not cause infection (aside from the rare case of Universal Poison) and their zombiism does not spread by any means. Animate Dead and possession by evil spirits are the only way to make these kind of zombies. They are typically weak to holy and fire (headshots not withstanding), and are resistant to/are immune to/absorb ice and unholy attacks.

Zombiism is almost always endemic to humans — animals are not generally affected in great numbers. This is reasonable under both Romero-style rules (as Zombiism often has quasi-religious implications such as "Hell being full") and Russo-style rules (since few viruses can cross species boundaries), though it does avert common tropes about disease. Exceptions do crop up (Resident Evil, for example, is packed to the brim with mutant zombie animals), but these will never fully take into account the major reason that zombie animals are so rare: it is all but impossible to tell anything like a coherent story while accurately conveying just how totally screwed humanity and the ecosystem would be under these conditions (something that the later Resident Evil films go out of their way to show). Exceptions will have one or two demon dogs, or maybe a flock of demon birds. Think a few million zombie humans is bad? It is estimated that in some major cities, rats outnumber humans at least eight to one. And if insects can be zombified, it's time to just lay down and die. Don't worry, it won't stick.

Another variation on the zombie theme would be Voudoun (known in Hollywood parlance as "Voodoo"). Those zombies may simply be mindless shamblers, or they may also be the flesh-eating type.

The improbability of zombie conquest of the earth when they follow these rules, given that the human body, zombified or not, is hardly a particularly effective adversary to modern military techniques and weapons, is almost never addressed. Note, though, that in most of the Russo zombie films, where zombiism is The Virus, the zombie menace is eventually contained. Under Romero rules, the pandemic nature of the effect does something to justify the trope: even in a secure, zombie-free enclave, any unexpected death, idiocy, or a nibble can place the community at risk by placing a zombie within their defensive perimeter (as demonstrated in Land of the Dead). In 28 Days Later, the "zombies" are not a naturally sustainable population, and survivors need do nothing more than stay alive until the majority of them have starved to death. The Russo rules subvert the concerns about military techniques, as they usually serve to further the spread of The Virus. In World War Z, a fairly holed explanation given is that a lot of modern weaponry is not very effective against zombies because a zombie won't notice any wound but a fatal headshot, and that unlike living soldiers, the undead do not lose morale, which means that they will never falter, break, or retreat from a battle. All of our weapons and offensive technologies are designed to kill humans; zombies don't suffer from shock, ruptured organs, etcetera except possibly being inconvenienced with the loss of limbs/mobility. In addition, human soldiers are trained to aim for the center of mass, not the head, making kill-shots on zombies hard to achieve, even for trained soldiers. This doesn't change the fact that most modern ordnance is more than capable of tearing apart what are essentially semi-decomposed corpses—a hi-ex round from an HMG will blow apart any unarmored organic object, irrespective of where it hits.

Overwhelmingly, Zombie Apocalypse stories tend to fall into one of two categories of political allegory. The Zombie horror can be used to make a political statement against capitalism and consumerism, with zombies representing the bulk of humanity as unthinking (flesh-eating) sheep (Zombies in the mall, anyone?). The other strain of zombie horror advocates hardcore individualism and libertarianism, again with the zombies as the "unthinking masses", but with an added emphasis on the heroic "well-prepared" survivalist, with Karmic Death to anyone who dares show compassion for others or cares about anything other than their own personal survival. Strangely, though zombies seem to fit the Aliens-As-Communists archetype, pro-capitalist, anti-communist zombie apocalypses are less common — and anything that would be considered patriotic is right out; the military is never anything but an obstacle at best, more often actively evil.

Often, zombie apocalypse stories are tied with a Science Is Bad message, or an allegory about human nature. (Night Of The Living Dead contained an allegory for race relations, though Romero stated that it was unintentional. Its sequel, Dawn of the Dead, skewered American consumerism.)

Failure is often the only option in these stories; rarely do they have an ending that could be considered "happy" by typical standards, or indeed one where humanity survives as a species. Often people in these stories will be Not Using The Z Word.

The Zombie Apocalypse is so iconic that perfectly sane people will formulate emergency survival plans in case of shambling corpses. There are also survival guides available all over the web and in print. The explanation occasionally given for this is if one is sufficiently prepared for the complete collapse of societal order and infrastructure and the almost spontaneous appearance of unending hordes of hostiles with a quick and simple method of conscription, one is effectively prepared for anything. Actual rescue agencies will sometimes have "Zombie Apocalypse" training exercises because it allows the people to brainstorm freely without causing political turf wars or falling into routine ideas (and because professional rescuers have dark senses of humor). And be honest, you know that you would secretly love for one to happen